Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [75]
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Another way to view your game-related notifications: Head to the Games page and then click “Game notifications” on the left side of the screen.
To quickly join a game you’ve been invited to or notified about, click the “Play now” link in the message or post.
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If notifications about games start to get annoying, no problem—just click “Mute game notifications” and you won’t see them anymore in your main stream, notifications panel, or Notifications stream—although you can still see them on the Games page by clicking “Game notifications.” To start receiving them in in all those places again, head to the main Games page and click the button that now reads “Unmute game notifications.”
Starting a Game
WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT the Games page, you’ll notice it’s quite a bit different from the other areas of Google+. In the center of the screen is a constantly changing section promoting “featured” games (whatever that means). If one of these games looks interesting, click the Play button in the lower-left of this section. You can check out other featured games by clicking their thumbnails in the lower right of the big promo box.
The Games stream section, farther down the page, shows all the recent activity by your friends who are sharing Google+ game achievements. Google+ intentionally tucks these little posts about achievements and requests for help from friends into this section of the Games page so you can ignore them in your main stream and see them collected here whenever you feel like checking on what’s happening in Procrastination Central. They’re not the same as direct notifications sent your way—those are handled in the Notifications stream.
Just like on the Stream page, you can use the links on the left side of the Games page to change what you’re looking at. When you arrive, you see the “Featured games” section. To see all the games Google+ has to offer, click the “All games” link (clicking “More games” below the promo box does the same thing). As of this writing, there are a total of 21 games, but that number is sure to rise.
The “All games” screen doesn’t provide much information about the games, though you can infer a few things from the games’ icons and names (Crime City, for example, doesn’t look like a game for pacifists). Click any game to get a better sense of what it’s about.
The first time you play a Google+ game, though, Google+ displays a box let you know that games are “social.” In other words, other people on Google+ will be able to see that you’re playing. For example, when people who’ve put you in their Google+ circles happen onto this game, they may see a tiny image of your profile picture to indicate that you’re one of the people they know who’s played this game. For more info about exactly what information gets shared with whom, click the “Learn more” link in the box’s lower-left corner. Before a Google+ game can share anything, it will show you all the ways it might share info about your playing activity, and you can usually limit which circles or people it shares that info with. So go ahead and click “Got it, let’s play.”
Now you get the details: A pop-up window appears with info about what the game wants to access. It may not be clear exactly what each item means; to learn more, click the tiny triangle to the left of each item.
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If the pop-up window doesn’t show up, you might have a pop-up blocking tool, or browser setting, that’s preventing the window from appearing. Look in your browser’s address bar or lower-right corner for any messages about blocked